Avraham Stern’s face was everywhere. It gazed down from hoardings and out of the pages of the newspapers. The photograph was rather unflattering. The subject stared sullenly at the camera with dark stubble shading his chin and cheeks, his mouth set in a resigned, unhappy line. The picture had been taken after his arrest in 1939 and it created the desired effect. Gone was the romantic, dandy revolutionary; in his place was a seedy-looking gangster.
The thought of his mother having to see her son’s image plastered over the walls of Tel Aviv with a thousand-pound price on his head filled Stern with anguish. ‘Dear and beloved mother,’ he wrote in what would be his last letter to her. ‘It pains me without limit that you are pained. But you know me and you know that the things they are saying about me are based on lies … may God grant that we see better days.’ He signed it with his childhood nickname, ‘Mema’.1
For months he had been able to keep up only intermittent contact with Roni, usually through letters delivered by courier. One day he decided to risk a night-time foray to see his long-suffering wife face-to-face. With Amper and Zak lying gravely wounded in hospital he had to rely on Yitzhak Tselnik – a graduate of the Polish training camps and now his chief lieutenant – to accompany him to the rendezvous. Roni arrived with her mother. Even though the couple’s circumstances were more desperate than ever, they had forgotten or perhaps deliberately abandoned their previous agreement not to have a family and she was now two months pregnant. They walked the darkened streets together for an hour. Stern seemed in good spirits, joking and murmuring endearments to Roni in Russian. When they parted his last words were: ‘You aren’t angry with me, are you? Tell me you aren’t angry. Tell me you love me.’ There was one further communication. He sent a note asking for clothes and enclosing five pounds. In it he remarked how it was only in the last few days that he had come to understand ‘how good it is that we will have a child’.2 Roni sent back a parcel of garments for him, including some silk socks.
If Stern remained in Tel Aviv he was bound to be caught. If he ventured out he was certain to be recognized and few would have any qualms about turning him in. Stern’s behaviour had dissolved the code of solidarity that made even law-abiding Jews reluctant to hand over one of their own to the British. The lavishness of the reward would also help to dispel scruples. A thousand pounds was a lot of money, enough to buy a substantial villa in Tel Aviv, and everyone was on the lookout. The Palestine Post, under the headline ‘Policeman Who Looks Like Gangster’, had related how ‘a Jewish plainclothesman unfortunate enough to bear a likeness to the much sought Abraham Stern has twice found himself dragged before the police since the publication of the reward notices. An Australian soldier seized the man in the street yesterday and brought him up to a Police Constable demanding the [money] on the spot.’3
Stern would be no safer if he stayed put. The unusual ménage in the rooftop flat in Mizrachi Bet Street was sure to attract attention. The roof was a busy place, with the other tenants coming and going throughout the day to hang up and take down their washing. How long could it be before someone began to wonder about the furtive figure flitting around behind the shutters of the apartment of ‘Mrs Bloch’?
There were just two of them there now. Moshe was only a mile or so away, recovering from his wounds at the Government Hospital in Jaffa. Tova did not dare visit him for fear of being followed. With Stern in residence, the flat was no place for a little girl and Herut was being looked after by her grandmother.
He passed the days writing and reading – Israel Zangwill’s Memoirs of a Social Revolutionary and a novel by Vicki Baum. The main contact with the outside world was through a thin, bespectacled woman called Hassia Shapira, a telephone operator at the newspaper HaBoker. She would deliver food and domestic supplies, carry messages and letters from the dwindling band of people willing to have anything to do with Yair, and take away his replies. Her comings and goings provided more fodder for gossipy neighbours. Tova told anyone who asked that the visitor was a friend who was looking after her while she recovered from her illness. By now the pretence had become a reality. Tova had developed a liver condition, which caused her acute pain in her side.
Stern had to move, but where to? Roni’s brother, Nehemia Brosh, would claim later that at this time the head of the Haganah, Eliyahu Golomb, came up with an unexpected offer. He proposed to hide Stern on a remote kibbutz and put the word around that he had fled abroad. Given the organization’s alliance with the British and its hostility to Stern, this seems remarkable. Brosh’s explanation was that Golomb had heard from the Haganah’s contacts inside the police that a decision had been reached that Stern would not be taken alive, and he wanted to spare him from the vengeance of the CID. The Haganah certainly had many agents among Jewish members of the force. It is possible that one of them had formed this impression from conversations or documents relating to the manhunt. In any case, Brosh said, Stern turned the offer down. He could not run away and hide when his men were in prison or lying in hospital under police guard.4 He could at least, though, try to move to somewhere less hazardous. Stern’s presence in the Svorais’ flat was a measure of his desperation. He had nowhere else to go. Ever since he had moved in, he, Moshe and Yitzhak Tselnik had tried to find safer alternatives. One idea was to move him to an ultra-religious neighbourhood where the inhabitants’ complete absorption in their own lives made them oblivious or indifferent to the activities of outsiders and there was a reduced risk of betrayal. Another was to smuggle him to Jerusalem in the back of a furniture lorry. This seemed to have the most chance of success and Tselnik was charged with organizing it. The operation was supposed to take place at the beginning of February.5
Every day brought new disasters. On 1 February, five days after they were shot by Morton, both Avraham Amper and Zelig Zak died of their wounds. According to Yaacov Levstein, he and the others had maintained a defiant front despite their injuries, threatening a hunger strike unless they were treated by Dr Marcus, a local physician who sympathized with their cause. They had ‘fasted for one day when Amper and Zak seemed to be doing better. Zak woke up and said that he felt strengthened by his wounds. Jokingly, he added that he was now bullet-proof. Amper also seemed to be in good spirits and sent regards to his friends and relatives.’6 The next day, though, they woke ‘pale and listless. At noon Zak suddenly collapsed, and by the time the nurse came in he was dead. About an hour later Amper suddenly took a turn for the worse and expired.’
The photographs published in the newspapers on 3 February showed Stern and five other wanted men. Pictured with him were Yaacov Polani, Binyamin Zeroni, Hanoch Strelitz, one Aharon Zukerman and Nahman Shulman, a low-ranking member of the band who was reported to have been hanging about 8 Yael Street before the outrage. Shulman was arrested the same evening.7
Those still at large had four choices. They could wait to be picked up. They could act like the ‘anonymous soldiers’ of Yair’s imagination, fight on, and, in all probability, meet the same fate as their comrades in Dizengoff Street. They could flee. Or they could give themselves up. Polani, who had a four-hundred-pound bounty on his head, took the third option and disappeared to a kibbutz at Maale Ha-Hamisha, in the hills west of Jerusalem.8
On 4 February, Strelitz and Zeroni, who, despite being far more important than Polani, merited bounties of only two hundred pounds each, gave themselves up. There are two versions of how this came about. According to police chief Alan Saunders, following the quarrel with Stern they had made up their minds that it was time to make their peace with the British. The police were ignorant of the split when ‘the two men approached the CID through intermediaries with a view to surrender’. Negotiations were still in progress at the time of the Yael Street bombing. Saunders was well aware of the potentially sobering effect that the subsequent shootings in Dizengoff Street had on the rest of Stern’s past and present associates. He wrote that, ‘unnerved, perhaps, by the vigorous police action at Dizengoff Street and the sight of their photographs in the press side by side with those of Stern and other desperate men, Strelitz and Zeroni surrendered unconditionally at an address in Tel Aviv’.9
A slightly different account circulated later which showed the pair in a less timorous light. According to this, they insisted on certain preconditions before handing themselves over. They approached the British through an intermediary, Yitzhak Berman, a Ukrainian-born, London-trained lawyer who was also a senior figure in the Irgun’s intelligence bureau. He was to offer their surrender, subject to three guarantees: they would not be handed over to Morton in Jaffa but to the CID at their headquarters in Jerusalem; they would not be tortured; they would not be put on trial but sent under the emergency regulations to a detention camp. Berman, who went on to become a government minister, claimed later that he took the offer to Dick Catling who pushed it up the line to Giles Bey. Giles agreed. Strelitz and Zeroni were whisked off to Jerusalem in Catling’s car and the British kept their word, sending them off to Mazra’a to join their brothers-in-arms.10
The following day, Aharon Zukerman, described by an informer as the group’s ‘secretary’ in Tel Aviv, followed their example. He had imagined that the police knew nothing about him. He was having breakfast in the Shederoth café in Allenby Road in Tel Aviv when he opened his newspaper to see his own face staring back at him above an offer of a hundred-pound reward. According to Giles he surrendered ‘unconditionally’ at CID headquarters, though again there is another account stating that via Berman’s good offices he managed to strike the same deal as the others. On 10 February, Baruch Moisevitz, whom the police believed to have been leader of the group in Tel Aviv at the time of the Yael Street bombings, and was perhaps the man mentioned by Levstein in his account of the attack, was arrested ‘on information supplied by secret sources’.11
Whether or not he was bypassed by these arrangements, Morton must have felt great satisfaction at the way things were going. One way or another, the Stern gang was being mopped up. Furthermore, the vigour the police had shown – exemplified by his own actions – had sent a strong message to other potential enemies that the game was not worth the candle. ‘It is generally believed among the more politically-minded Tel Aviv Jews that the tempo and determination displayed by Government and Police to root out and destroy the Stern movement will have far reaching results,’ he wrote to Giles Bey on 3 February.12 ‘If successful [this] will serve as an effective deterrent to other individuals and groups who, in the future, like Stern, may become possessed with the idea that without political and party backing, and with public sympathy they can overawe the nation and set up [a] “Chicago administration” against which the government would powerless to act.’
This was a succinct but fairly accurate assessment of what Stern had been aiming to do. All his life he had tried to fit his talents and ambitions into the confines of institutions and organizations – the Hebrew University, the Revisionist movement, the underground. His nature ensured that each attempt ended in failure. The name he had been born with and the name he had chosen for himself revealed the problem. Stern, by coincidence, means ‘star’ in Yiddish, one of the languages spoken in Suwalki. From childhood he had been a performer, revelling in the limelight of theatrical productions and recitals. His desire for attention was evident in his dress. The man who proclaimed his willingness to endure misery, filth and death felt uneasy if he was separated from his silk socks. Behind this apparently harmless, even touching vanity lay something much more dangerous.
Stern was incapable of sharing centre stage with anyone. To act alongside him meant accepting a minor part, and those who questioned his right to the top billing, such as Raziel, Strelitz and Zeroni, were first confronted, then rejected.
He picked his own roles – poet, dreamer, lover, international wheeler-dealer. The greatest of these was that of ‘Yair’. Yair was the man he wanted to be, a feared and fearless warrior, noble and self-sacrificing, whose dedication would lead him to a redeemer’s death. Now the performance seemed hollow and ridiculous. His poetry was steeped in blood, but he had never felt the rush of horror and excitement that came with looking a man in the eyes as you shot him dead or pressing the button that exploded an infernal machine. But the drama was not over yet. There was still another act to come, still time to bring the theatre to its feet.
Later his followers would claim that he knew the end − a violent one − was coming but was fatalistically resigned to it. It would not mean extinction but redemption. Binyamin Zeroni testified that ‘Yair dreamed of death. In conversations and discussions between us he always focused on death … whereas I thought you must fight for an idea, he said you had to die for it. He would often say “it doesn’t matter if they kill me”.’13 Yitzhak Tselnik would maintain later that before the Dizengoff Street shootings Stern had seen his capture and trial as an opportunity to denounce British policy in Palestine. After the bloodbath ‘it was clear to him he wouldn’t be taken prisoner but instead would be shot on the spot’.14
On 11 February, Dick Catling summed up for the benefit of Giles Bey the actions taken by the police since the Yael Street outrage. Two of the Stern group were dead. Eighty-five more were locked up; three were serving jail sentences, six were on remand and facing trial and the rest were being held under emergency regulations.15 That amounted to a clear majority of the known membership of the group. The organization was in smithereens, morale had evaporated and, of the old command echelon, only the leader remained at large.
On 7 February, Hassia Shapira arrived early at the flat and announced that she thought she might have been followed. It was a feeling rather than a conviction. Stern told her she must from now on stay away from Mizrachi Bet Street. Their only trusted link with the outside world was, for the time being at least, severed. What were they to do for food? Tova decided to go down to the local grocer’s shop and ask the woman who owned it if she would deliver provisions as her helper had herself fallen ill. ‘“Don’t worry, Mrs Bloch,” the nice lady answered,’ wrote Tova some years afterwards.16 ‘“I can bring you the goods at home but only in the evening.”’ The following night the shopkeeper duly turned up. When she knocked on the door, ‘Yair went into the wardrobe and I closed the door on him. The weary shopkeeper sat for a minute that went on and on. She had many interesting stories about her customers …’ When the Good Samaritan finally left, Tova waited until her footsteps had faded from the stairwell and ‘hurried to open the wardrobe door so he could finally breathe air’.
Tova admitted that she found such incidents very trying. Stern, by contrast, emerged from his confinement ‘wearing a pleasant smile and in a good mood’. He tried to calm her down but her nerves were fraying. Yitzhak Tselnik was still trying to find a refuge for Stern in Jerusalem. On the evening of 9 February he came to report on that and other matters. The procedure was for Tselnik to wait some way off for Tova to descend, walk to an alleyway up the street and, by showing herself, signal that it was safe for him to go up. That day, she related afterwards, as she emerged from the front door she noticed a man ‘wearing a hat and dressed in a black coat’ who followed her. The street was lined with stalls, illuminated by electric light bulbs, and after passing her the man turned back to examine her face. Whether or not he recognized her, she claimed that she recognized him: he was one of the detectives who had burst into their flat in Tel Aviv when Moshe had been arrested along with Yaacov Polani and Yehoshua Zettler the previous May. She had encountered him a second time after Polani and Zettler had escaped from the police station, when detectives paid another visit to the apartment believing they might be hiding there. She climbed back up the stairs, flustered and distressed, and told Stern what she had – or might have – seen. Was she positive the man was a policeman, he wanted to know? She was not. Perhaps it was her nerves making her imagine things.17
Half a mile away from Stern and Tova’s claustrophobic hideaway, Geoffrey Morton was struggling to close the circle around his prey. This was no longer a straightforward police operation. The hunt for the perpetrators was now intensely personal. Svorai claimed that when he burst into the room at 30 Dizengoff Street, Morton had shouted Schiff’s name – demanding to know who had murdered him. There is no mention of this in Morton’s testimony as, perhaps, is to be expected. In the light of Morton’s record and writings, however, it does not seem altogether improbable.
Morton brought to his police work a belief in the sanctity of authority that was in its way as hard and fierce as Stern’s nationalist zeal. It stretched back sixteen years, to the moment of revelation when a single burly constable had quelled a mob of rioters at the Elephant and Castle. Since then he had suffered many disappointments and some disillusionment. But he had kept faith, and been rewarded for his fidelity. To be a policeman was to be far more than a mere enforcer of the law. He saw himself and his colleagues as the custodians of a system that formed the foundation of civilized life. An attack on one policeman was an attack on all of them and, by extension, on society itself; or at least British society and therefore the best example of it.
By declaring war on the British police Stern had established himself as an enemy of everything Morton held sacred. Morton had never met Avraham Stern but he had formed a strong opinion of who he was and what he stood for. Morton was well informed about his opponent’s background. He would have known about his academic record and his cultured tastes – enthusiasms that Morton, the music lover, shared. None of this mattered.
Nor did the fact that Yair had merely overseen operations mitigate his guilt. He had come to represent all the bad that was done not just in his name but by the Jewish underground in general. It was this perception that had led Morton, against all his policeman’s training and instincts, to blame Stern for the death of his friend Wally Medler in Jaffa four years earlier, even though there was no evidence to connect him to the case.18
Now Stern was alone, cornered and helpless. The mano a mano was reaching its end. It was time for the reckoning. But where was he? It seems that at this point neither the police, the Haganah nor, despite their earlier claim, the Irgun had any idea where Stern might be. His image was everywhere, offering the public the prospect of an easy thousand pounds. The eyes of every policeman in the land were peeled for Palestine’s number one gangster, and every informant was on the alert to pull off a lucrative coup. Yet it would not be a tip-off that led the police to the door of 8 Mizrachi Bet Street but an extraordinary sequence of events that began in the ward of the Government Hospital, just over a mile from the CID building near the Jaffa seafront, where Yaacov Levstein and Moshe Svorai were still being treated. What happened there, wrote Morton, would ‘provide us with the clue for which the whole police force was watching.’19